Navigation

News

Singularity Viewer is an exciting client for Second Life and OpenSim, which strives to combine the beloved look and feel of Viewer 1.23 with the latest and greatest of available technology, and to stay compatible with future Second Life changes and features.

Singularity is an open-source project powered entirely by volunteer force and willpower!

Also, I apologize for not having posted this sooner. We plan to have more builds out soon.

There are plenty of features and fixes in these builds as well, and we'd love to have your feedback.

Our alpha builds are what become our release builds, so please don't be scared off by the title, they're usually more stable than our last release! (And if they're not, you better tell us before they become our release!)

This past year has been a tumultuous one for our team, one of our developers passed away, another one left to pursue other interests, we were hampered in our ability to update and test the viewer by a lack of infrastructure and hardware issues.

It was not all bad, as we recently gained a new developer, miKa-Pyon, most of our hardware issues were resolved, and we’re working on improvements with renewed vigor.

Nevertheless, Singularity is constantly evolving, and as we move on to new technologies, we cannot retain support for older platforms. Our toolchain has been updated, we now use modern programming language features which require recent GCC and Microsoft Visual Studio™ 2015. Unfortunately, as part of this required toolchain update, some older platforms have become too burdensome if not impossible to support. On the upside, thanks to these newer language features we can write better code and get better performance for the viewer. Not only can we use modern C++, we are also able to share code and prebuilt libraries with our sister project, Alchemy Viewer, this is highly beneficial as the development workload is now halved between our two projects. Due to these updates, those compiling our project will find that we now make use of autobuild.While making 32-bit linux builds is very high on our agenda, it requires a large effort and did not make this deadline. We are currently in need of a Mac developer to help us get Singularity for macOS back on track and building again.

Now, on to the other changes (There are a lot of them):

Skin Changes:

‘Gemini’ now included as part of standard release. The default skin is still ‘Dark’, but this skin is a nice dark-themed alternative.

Special thanks goes out to Adeon Writer, Cale Flanagan, Damian Zhaoying, Deltek Minotaur, Diva Canto, Eva Darkwyr, Fritigern Gothly, Gamer Expert, Melissa, MiVo, Nomade Zhao, Pure Bluestar, Router Gray, Shamara Henley, Tazy Scientist, YanewS, and all our other testers and bug reporters, and everyone who sends in crash reports, and you, yes you, you took the time to read through this, so thank you for caring!

Lastly, we’d like to dedicate this release in memory of Latif Khalifa (lkalif), who has contributed so much to this and other viewers and opensource metaverse projects, like his own Radegast viewer, libomv, and OpenSim. His contributions to the metaverse have been invaluable and are too numerous to mention. Suffice to say that without him, the metaverse would not have been what it is today.

Recently we heard from a common friend, that our long-time friend and contributor Latif Khalifa has passed away. Kinda waited for him to pop back up and yell that the rumours of his demise are greatly exaggerated, but this is apparently not happening. He helped us organize the project and taught us a lot and set up some of our crucial infrastructure. His contributions to other open-source projects shall also live on. Our condolences to his friends&family!

This is a minor patch release purely intended for users with AMD
graphics cards. It resolves the issues displaying rigged meshes when
using Catalyst Driver releases newer than version 14.9. There are no
other changes included in this release, so if you're currently on 1.8.6 and this change is not relevant to you, then feel free to ignore this update.

A special thanks to the users who attended our first official meeting in-world; to those of you who couldn’t come or didn’t know, we promise the next one will be much better timing for people across the world and better advertised in advance. ~ Lirusaito

The Singularity development team would like to thank everyone who has helped make Singularity better by testing alphas, reporting bugs, and suggesting great features.

Siana added a new way to move around the virtual worlds by using a mouse. Clicking on your avatar and holding the left mouse button pressed already allows you to look around when mouse is moved. Now, while still keeping the left mouse pressed, you can press and hold the right mouse button which will let you move around just using a mouse. This works on both walking and flying mode.

Thanks to Shyotl, this release also brings significant performance improvements for the rendering engine. Support for “Fitted Mesh” has been merged allowing better fitting mesh garments. For more details, see this post. Creating this new type of mesh is explained on the wiki.

To Linux Users: When you update to this version, your graphics preferences will reset! If you value them, make a screenshot before you run the new version. This is brought on by a change made to better identification of graphics cards.

The Singularity development team would like to thank everyone who has helped make Singularity better by testing alphas, reporting bugs, and suggesting great features.

Singularity now supports display of object materials and the enhancements to the particle system (glowing and ribbon particles). This release also adds a native Windows 64-bit support and a host of new features and bug fixes:

Merged support for materials and the new particle system capabilities. Enhanced and improved the performance of these features. (Shyotl)

Added support for GetMesh2 capability allowing for faster download of meshes. (Aleric)

Ability to show Whisper, Chat and Shout range rings on the MiniMap. (SLB)

Rings can be toggled by right clicking on the MiniMap

Made the chat rings aware of OpenSim chat range settings. (Lirusaito)

Thanks to Diva Canto for serverside support!

Implemented right click option on MiniMap to hide or show objects. (Jayden Beresford)

Added MiniMapPrimMaxAltitudeDelta and MiniMapPrimMaxAltitudeDeltaOwn debug settings which allow customization of which objects are shown on the mini-map based on proximity. (Lirusaito)

Fixed an issue with teleport failures and saving scripts taking a very long time on OpenSim regions run in the same simulator instance such as mega-regions (Aleric)

Allow typing grid login url directly into the grid field on the login panel without the need to open the grid manager. (Lirusaito)

Added Google Breakpad crash reporting system. (Latif)

By default the viewer will ask if the crash report should be sent to the Singularity Development Team in case the last run has crashed. This behaviour can be changed in Preferences -> General -> Crash reports where it can be permanently disabled or enabled. We encourage the users to send in these reports and help make Singularity more stable.

Use built-in web browser for displaying chat logs, making it cross-platform. (Lirusaito)

The old way is available for use on Windows via a checkbox in Adv. Chat UI

Backported fixes for crashes when using the latest ATI drivers. (Siana)

Native 64-bit Windows support (Latif)

Thanks to Sovereign Engineer for providing some of the prebuilds used in the 64 bit Windows builds

Known limitation of the Windows 64 bit viewer is the lack of support for the Quicktime plugin which means that certain types of parcel media will not play. Streaming music and shared media (MoaP) are not affected and will work fine.

More Opensim conformity (Lirusaito)

Added camera presets to the quick preferences panel. (Lirusaito)

Allow ctrl/shift-scroll wheel to adjust camera offset. (Lirusaito)

Can be disabled with SinguOffsetScrollKeys debug setting (Sovereign Engineer)

Smooth mouselook zoom from Exodus (Lirusaito)

Alt-right clicking in mouselook bring up menu. Can be disabled with LiruMouselookMenu debug setting. (Lirusaito)

Shift-clicking in the center, “hole”, of the pie menus now returns to the previous pie menu when there is one, otherwise it closes the menu. (Lirusaito)

Context (dropdown) menus can now be used instead of pie menus. Setting is in Preferences -> System. (Lirusaito)

The Singularity development team would like to thank everyone who has helped make Singularity better by testing alphas, reporting bugs, and suggesting great features.

Update Nov 16, 2013: An issue with camera controls was identified in build 5433 which was corrected in updated build 5434.

This release brings fixes for a couple of crashes and several other improvements:

Much improved Collada exporter, which now has the ability to export textures, apply texture parameters such as repeats, offset and others to the exported UV map, combine prim faces with the same texture and color into one submesh and optionally skip transparent faces (Latif)

Restored Teleport, Pay, and Log buttons in the IM window (Inusaito)

Spanish translation update (Damian)

Fixed a crash in audio code (Siana)

Fixed a crash when RLV is enabled and viewing inventory was forbidden (Aleric)

Legacy (pre-multiwear) wearables on some grids showed as (body part) shapes. Clothing (not body parts yet) now show with a (new) red question mark icon in the inventory, and can be used again. (Aleric)

When uploading animations, save the values for ease-in and -out parameters, for future uploads. (Inusaito)

Disable/Enable UI shortcut changed to Ctrl-Shift-F1 on Linux since the default Ctrl-Alt-F1 is used for switching virtual consoles. The same has been done for the other ctrl-alt-F# shortcuts on Linux. (Inusaito)

Added the ability to save textures from the inventory menu. (Inusaito)

Added an option to open inventory folders in a new separate window. (Inusaito)

This release brings the ability to see and interact with shared media (also known as MoaP - media on a prim) thanks to Shyotl. Autoplay of shared media is disabled by default and can be enabled in Preferences -> Audio & Video by checking “Automatically play prim media” option.

Our skins package has been improved and added to, it can be found here. To add all the skins, extract this package into the viewer install directory, that's usually C:\Programs Files\Singularity\ on Windows, /Applications/Singularity.app/Contents/Resources/ on Mac, and wherever you extracted the tarball to on Linux.

Finally, thanks to all who tested the alphas, reported bugs, and requested brilliant features.